Yahoo partners with Samsung for news & weather reports on TV

Yahoo has partnered with Samsung to bring news and weather information to TV screens. Rolling out in select markets around the globe, the ‘NewsON’ panel delivers the latest local news articles, videos and weather to Samsung Smart TV users with the click of a remote.

The NewsON panel is available on Samsung Smart TVs in select countries in Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. It’s the first product from a new, multi-year partnership to bring more Yahoo content and services to Samsung Smart TVs worldwide.

The NewsON main screen is a collage of photos and headlines from Yahoo news stories with a snapshot of current weather conditions for local cities. Now, instead of watching 30 minutes of a news programme to get up-to-speed on current events, users can switch over to NewsON for the latest headlines. One can click through each story for a summary, the full article, or a streaming news video. Selecting weather shows current conditions and weekly forecasts for all the local cities, with photos from Flickr. With a click of a remote, users have immediate access – even in low bandwidth environments – to the day’s most popular reports.

Incidentally, this is not the first time that Yahoo and Samsung have formed a partnership. It may be recalled that in 2009, Samsung became one of the initial partners to integrate the Yahoo Widget Engine (now called Yahoo Connected TV) into its TV line.

Since launching the Yahoo Connected TV platform in 2009, Yahoo has been working with the top TV brands, and those partnerships have expanded and evolved over the years.

In November 2012, Yahoo and Samsung announced an expanded, multi-year partnership to integrate Yahoo’s Broadcast Interactivity platform into Samsung 2012 Smart TVs.